Garden Design Styles

Quick Answer Designing a townhouse or terraced garden successfully comes down to three things: breaking the space into distinct zones, using vertical growing to maximise every centimetre of boundary, and choosing low-maintenance plants that earn their place in all four seasons. A small plot is never a barrier to a beautiful garden. With the right […]

BBC Garden Rescue designer Lee Burkhill reveals how to get privacy in an overlooked back garden using standard trees, pleached screens and clever planting.

Quick Answer A cottage garden is designed around dense, layered planting using a mix of roses, perennials, biennials, annuals, herbs, and climbers in an informal layout with curved beds and natural path materials. Start with a backbone of roses and structural shrubs, build layers from tall to low, choose a soft harmonious colour palette, and […]

Designing a family friendly garden that works for kids AND adults? BBC Garden Rescue designer Lee Burkhill shares expert zoning tips, DIY play features, safe plant choices and before-and-after examples. Free guide.

Japanese garden design is one of the most studied, imitated, and misunderstood garden styles in the world. I have been fascinated by it for years, both as a garden designer and as someone who has travelled to Japan specifically to walk through the gardens that inspired the whole tradition. Quick Answer A successful Japanese garden […]

Quick Answer A sloped garden is not a problem to solve but a design opportunity to embrace. The most successful approach is to work with the gradient by creating generous, deep terraces connected by wide shallow steps, using retaining walls of sleepers, stone, or brick to hold each level, and slowing the eye and the […]

Real small garden makeover breakdown: £4,500-£9,000 costs, design decisions that actually work, and the specific mistakes I see repeated on every compact garden project. Honest advice from a BBC Garden Rescue designer.

Having a formal front garden is a statement piece, and ideally, it should match the style of the property it will sit with. Period properties, townhouses and turn-of-the-century properties lend themselves really well to a formal garden design. New build houses can also be excellent candidates for a formal garden layout, especially with the trend […]

Quick Answer To design your own garden you need a handful of affordable drawing tools and measuring equipment. The essentials are A3 graph paper, tracing paper, a 10m tape measure, a compass and quality pencils. A lightbox and pop-up easel make the process considerably more comfortable, and coloured pencils or watercolours let you bring your […]

Today, I’m giving you the exact template I use on private clients’ work and BBC Garden Rescue, completely free. This is not a tick box exercise, but a systematic ‘logical’ approach to understanding what you need from your garden. It helps demystify where to start with any garden design. Showing what’s possible within your constraints, […]